Business

PayPal Nearly Tripled Mobile Payment Volume on Cyber Monday

People are getting much more used to buying things on their mobile devices, suggest data that PayPal released.

On “Cyber Monday” (the online baby sister of Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving shopping rush), the online payments service saw payments through mobiles—as opposed to online in general—go up by 190% as against the same day in 2011.

From noon until 1 p.m. EST was the busiest shopping hour across all devices, including PCs—lunchtime shopping, evidently—but mobile-only shopping peaked an hour later, from 1 to 2 p.m.

166% more people shopped via mobile devices than last year.

Houston, Miami and Los Angeles bought the most stuff via their phones.

This data fits with an earlier study by IBM suggesting that across all devices (not just mobiles), Cyber Monday saw a 30% increase in sales from last year, making it the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history. (That seems to rebut suggestions that Cyber Monday is going to disappear because more people will start their online shopping on Thanksgiving Thursday itself.) IBM’s study also recorded a 70% increase in the number of people using their phones to shop.

The discrepancy between PayPal’s 190% and IBM’s 70% could be due to at least two factors. One is that while the number of people shopping through mobiles has gone up, the amount each person is spending might have gone up too, as they get more comfortable with treating a mobile phone like any other payment method.

But it’s just as likely that PayPal’s massive push into mobile payments is helping the company gain a disproportionate share of this market.

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